Annales
d’histoire économique et sociale (1928—)

(The
Annales School )

In
1929, a new journal called Annales d’historie economique et sociale
appeared in France, featuring the work of a new generation of historians:
Lucian Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and Ernst Labrousse. Until
the turn of the century, traditional history was built around the acts
and facts of "great men", political and military personalities
who became the stuff of legends: Alexander and Caesar, Gengis Khan, Louis
XIV and Napoleon. These exceptional individuals defined the scale of history;
their deaths signalled a change of era and also of books and authors.
The movement was in search for “a larger and a more human history,”
by its rejection of the predominant conceptions of writing history, namely:

a
focus on political-military history

concentrated
on the analysis of short periods

a narrative style of events

what they called a “stamp collecting” mentality in collecting
facts and events

The
Annales wanted to integrate insights and methodologies from anthropology,
geography, sociology, economics and psychology. It was interested in longer
timespans, the social history of everyday life, and “mentalites”
(modes of consciousness). In essence, it was an analytical history which
looked at economic and social history in a long-term perspective, departing
from a traditional event-based historiography. These historians rebelled
against traditional historians' obsession
with wars and states,
the “great” men of history, and
looking
at development as linear.Annales
school historians examined phenomena and their underlying causes in depth
with a particular attention to long stretches of time. Peter Burke has
divided the movement in three phases or generations:

Phase
1 (1920-1945): the movement is very radical and subversive and strongly
opposes the tradition of political history. [Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre]

Phase
2 (1945-1968): the movement becomes a school of thought, with its
main concepts (structure-conjuncture) and method (serial history of
changes over the long term). [Fernand Braudel, Ernst Labrousse]

Phase
3 (1968-1989): the school becomes more fragmented and shifts its
concern from the socio-economic to the socio-cultural. [Ariel, Bourdieau,
Goffman, etc.]

PHASE 1

Marc Bloch (social psychology)Bloch started with a study of what he called ‘collective illusions’.
In The Royal Touch he looked at the belief that the king’s touch
could cure people from diseases. He compared France and England on a long
term scale and analysed how such collective illusions survived after the
Middle Ages. His aim was to problematize the fact that people believed
such improbable things for a prolonged period in time, and to point to
possible causes of such a phenomenon. A survey of this kind could be regarded
as a psychological history, and Bloch partly applies Durkheim’s ideas
on collective beliefs and mentalities.

In 1931 Bloch published French Rural History.
This work is important for the Annales school because it uses a
regressive method (lire l’histoire à rebours). Bloch believed
that it was better to proceed from the known to the unknown, hence he
reads history “backwards”.His study
on feudal society examines the culture of feudalism, its sense of time,
forms of collective memory, and the structures of feeling and thought.
Bloch here and elsewhere attacks the “idol” of origins
arguing that historical phenomena ought to be explained in terms of their
own time, rather than of earlier periods.

Febvre (linguistics, human geography)In 1922, Lucien Febvre published La Terre et l'évolution
humaine (translated as A Geographical Introduction to History,
1932). His work on religion is an example of a historical linguistics
of the impossibility of atheism in the 16th century.

PHASE 2

Ernst Labrousse (conjuncture and structure)He was an economic historian who largely used quantitative methods.
He also introduced the idea of conjuncture (which can be translated
as “trend”), i.e., the connection between diverse yet simultaneous
phenomena. Conjuncture came to be contrasted with the idea of structure,
in the sense that conjuncture identified the short-medium term whereas
structure concerned long-term.Conjuncture
and structure were however complementary to one another in Labrousse.
He also adopted demographic models and mainly wrote regional history.

Fernand Braudel (methodological structuralism)
Braudel became a crucial figure of the Annales movement, and is reckoned
by some to be the greatest historian of the 20th century and the father
of modern historiography. His most famous work, Méditerranée
et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe
II, made him an international reputation.The
next generation of historical scholars were brought up to believe in the
words of its preface: the old history of events was indeed dead, “the
action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing
little relation to the slow and powerful march of history . . . those
statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors.”
Beneath human history, Braudel attempted to describe deeper unities
and lengthy rhythms of material life relating to the geographical environment
and the structures that shape societies such as technology, trading, sailing
routes, and mentalities.

In their place Braudel offered not “the traditional geographical
introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the
beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits,
types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned
again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of
sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes
with the seasons,” but a whole new way of looking at the past, in
which the historian re-created a lost reality through a feat of historical
imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of
the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter, and the weaver, the skills of
the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records
of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for
a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library.
Only the third section of Braudel's book returned to the events of history
which are merely “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the
tides of history carry on their strong backs.” According to Braudel,
historical time is divided into three forms of movement:

geographical time

social time

individual time

But beyond all these froms of movement, the past was really a unity:
“history can do more than study walled gardens”—this
was the ultimate expression of the intellectual ambitions of the Annales
school.

Braudel also demonstrated that history does not exist independently of
the historian's gaze. As in all knowledge, the historian intervenes at
every stage in the making of history; indeed history per se does not exist.
All that exists was past phenomena submerged under the cloak of all-consuming
time. Braudel introduces the social sciences (esp. geography, political
economics and sociology) to history.

In Mediterranée, Braudel is interested first and foremost
in the environment in which the peoples of the Mediterranean basin used
to live: the mountains and the plains, the sea and the rivers, the roads
and the towns. He combines the almost fixed rhythm of “geographic
time” with the rapid rhythm of “individual time” and
the movement of peoples and their ideas. Mediterranée, is
divided in three parts. The first part is in fact a geohistory and a history
of the environment. In the second part, he looks at the general trends
of the mediterranean people, writing a kind of history of structures,
the economic, the geographical, the technological, etc. In part 3, Braudel
is concerned with undermining the history of events. He poses individuals
and events in such a broad context, that they become fundamentally unimport.
The longue durée cannot serve as the loci for any individual subject.
In so doing, he tries to demonstrate that a history of events can only
provide a superficial reading of society’s development (cf. Foucault's
decentering of the human subject). The most relevant factors are actually
the slowly altering material conditions (e.g., geography, climate). Within
the context of human history Braudel emphasises two themes: 1) technology
and 2) exchange.

1) Human history is a history of technological mastery and the
development of the skills basic to ancient civilisation: fire and water
technology, pottery, weaving, metalworking, seafaring and finally writing.
This emphasis on the physical realities of early civilizations brings
out the actual quality of life with a vividness that no amount of reading
other books can achieve;

2) As to the importance of exchange, especially long-distance
exchange: “Our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory
a witness to those imbalances productive of exchange which would set
the rhythm of its entire life.” It is imbalance that creates exchange
and therefore leads to progress. These two ideas, first formulated in
The Mediterranean, and subsequently explored in depth in for
the preindustrial world in Civilization and Capitalism, are applied
in the Memory and the Mediterranean to the ancient Mediterranean
with great effect.

capitalist mechanism (the realm of consumption, where change is more
rapid).

Here again in the first part, “The structures of everyday life”,
he takes a global and long-term approach. His concern is with what sustains
life as a whole, as well as habit. There is no reference to symbolic structures,
nor to the history of meaning. The second, “Wheels of commerce”
is about the market economy and the ways it co-existed with the non-market
economy in early modernity. In the third part, Perspective of the world”,he takes a systemic approach which is heavily influenced by the
world-system theory of Wallerstein. Braudel introduced crucial concepts
to the school and helped linking it to the currents in anthropology and
linguistics in vogue at the time. Braudel was dismissive of two important
tools of the Annales school, viz. quantitative history and the
history of mentalities. His method was primarily structuralist.

Memory and the Mediterranean begins with the history of the Mediterranean
seabed itself—the layers of clay, sand, and limestone from which
the Egyptians carved their tombs and built their temples. What follows
is the epic story of how the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and
Romans, and the great river civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt struggled
and thrived in this demanding but gloriously beautiful world bordered
and shaped by the Mediterranean.

Braudel’s main contribution lies in his insistence on writing total histories:
“Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework
of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes
and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also
the unity of life.” Unlike Febvre and Bloch, Braudel says very little
about the history of mentalities. His main priority was to show that time
moves at different speeds, and he divides time into geographical,
social, and individual. He also examines long stretches of time, introducing
into historiography the notion of la longue durée.

Lucien Febvre died in 1956, and Braudel inherited the direction of both
the VIe section de l'Ecole pratique des hautes études and
the journal Annales. He fostered one of the most extraordinary
collections of talent in the 20th century through his appointments including
Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice Aymard;
the philosophers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the
psychologists Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux; the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu; the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss;
and the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution or building where
all his colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign
visitors could be invited as associate professors; this idea, begun about
1958, did not achieve physical shape until the opening of the Maison
des Sciences de l'Homme in 1970.

PHASE 3

The new Annales history of the 1960’s turned away from the factual/quantitative
economic and descriptive social history, and reaffirmed the Durkheimian
idea of the “history of mentalities.” It held that the historical
world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed
to recognise that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions.

Roman Jakobson transmitted t

he linguistic theory of Saussure to
Lévi-Strauss. This led to structural anthropology which influenced
the later Annales School.

The third generation reasserted
the anthropological realm, especially through cultural anthropology, to
reemphasize politics proper, and to return to history as narrative. Bourdieau
for instance replaced the notion of social rules with that of habit and
strategy. Other studies in the 1960’s and 1970’s ceased to question the
causal relationship between events and structures and opted for an understanding
of them as mutually reflecting.

Braudel's reply to this development was his last great projected
work, The Identity of France, three volumes of which were published
before his death, including sections on geography, demography and economy.
Braudel took the view that the peasant was the key to the history of France,
and a true history of mentalities could only be written in the longue
durée and from a long perspective.